Alfred Kazin

Alfred Kazin (June 5, 1915 – June 5, 1998) was an American writer and literary critic. His literary reviews appeared in The New York Times, the New York Herald-Tribune, The New Republic and The New Yorker. He wrote often about the immigrant experience in early twentieth-century America. His trilogy of memoirs, A Walker in the City (1951), Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) and New York Jew (1978), were all finalists for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

He was a distinguished professor of English at Stony Brook University of the State University of New York (1963-1973) and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (1973-1978, 1979-1985).

He was born to Russian Jewish immigrants in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York City. His father, Charles Kazin, was a house-painter from Minsk. His mother, Gita Fagelman, was a dressmaker from Russian Poland. His father was a socialist and acolyte of Eugene V. Debs, while his mother was Orthodox. His sister, Pearl Kazin Bell (1922–2011) was also a writer and critic. She was an assistant literary editor at Harper's Bazaar as well as a regular fiction critic for The New Leader, Partisan Review and Commentary.

He graduated from Franklin K. Lane High School and the City College of New York. However, his politics were more moderate than most of the New York Intellectuals, many of whom were socialists. He rejected Stalin early on. In 1934, he got an early break reviewing books for The New Republic. The opportunity came about after he visited The New York Times office that summer to express his disagreement with a book review published by the newspaper that was written by John Chamberlain. Chamberlain met with Kazin and was impressed by his arguments and recommended him to editors at The New Republic. He also graduated with an MA from Columbia University in 1938.

Kazin was deeply affected by his peers' subsequent disillusion with socialism and liberalism. Adam Kirsch writes in The New Republic that "having invested his romantic self-image in liberalism, Kazin perceived abandonment of liberalism by his peers as an attack on his identity".

In 1942, at the age of 27, he published his first book, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. Orville Prescott of The New York Times wrote: "With 'On Native Grounds' he takes his place in the first rank of American practitioners of the higher literary criticism."

In 1951, he wrote the acclaimed memoir A Walker in the City, where he details his childhood in the Jewish milieu of Brownsville in Brooklyn. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1952. The subsequent sequels, Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) and New York Jew (1978) were also finalists for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

He wrote out of a great passion—or great disgust—for what he was reading and embedded his opinions in a deep knowledge of history, both literary history and politics and culture. In 1996 he was awarded the first Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Criticism, which carries a cash award of $100,000. As of 2014, the only other person to have won the award was George Steiner.